The Liberté readers were prepared specially for use in the multidisciplinary course Liberté: France’s Impact on the Nineteenth Century, led by Olchar Lindsann & Brian Counihan at Community High School in Roanoke, Virginia. Comprised entirely of texts available in the public domain, the readers are intended to present an introduction to the dramatic and hotly-contested progress of French society as it entered, and helped to create, the modern age, bringing together together artifacts and texts from the domains of politics, literature, history, philosophy, and art that attempt to indicate not only the dominant trends in French society, but also those underground counter-currents which have always existed within and against it.

While intending a fully-rounded evocation of French history, politics, economics and social thought during the century, their most important role from the perspective of the mOnocle-Lash Community is their integration of a history of the French avant-garde from the first use of the term in 1827 through the Symbolists, and particularly extensive research and translations appearing here for the first time. Read from this perspective, the series presents, albeit only impressionistically, the first comprehensive treatment in English of the development of the avant-garde between 1827–1900.

Published in conjunction with Community High School. The Liberté books must be purchased through the Lulu website; sorry for the inconvenience.

Vol. IV begins with the collapse of the Third Empire and the crushing of the Paris Commune, through the tribulations of the Third Republic, the Dreyfus Affair, the first rumblings of Fascism, and the development of commercial culture. We see the ascendency of Liberal Positivism, the agitation of conservative forces by General Boulanger, and countercultural responses in the form of Anarchism, Communism, Naturalism, Nihilism, Decadence, and Symbolism, pointing into the 20th Century.

Includes passages from Marie Curie, Remy de Gourmont, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Pietr Kropotkin, Stéphane Mallarmé, Judith Gautier, Octave Mirbeau, Emile Zola, Prosper Lissagaray, Ephraïm Mikhaël, Paul Déroulède, Guy de Maupassant, Jean Richepin, Jules Verne, Èmile Hennequin, Maurice Rollinat, Adolphe Thiers, Théophile Gautier, Karl Marx, Napoleon III, Max Nordau, Joseph Proudhon, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, William Eichoff, Earnest A. Visitelly, Frances Willard, William John Robertson, Lonsdon Hale, Robert Sherard, and L.S. Bevington.

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